Norval Morrisseau Shaman Artist at the National Gallery (2006)

Norval Morrisseau Shaman Artist at the National Gallery (2006)

CBC National News Special with Gabe Vadas and Greg Hill

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Pioneer makes his final breakthrough

An ailing, old man in a wheelchair will make history Wednesday when he arrives at the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Canada and officially ends a long history of apartheid at the country's leading art institution.

Anishnaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird and sometimes called "Picasso of the North," is scheduled to travel this week from a nursing home in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island to attend a landmark exhibition of his paintings and drawings at the National Gallery.

Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist is the first solo show by a First Nations artist ever at the 126-year-old National Gallery. A media preview, attended by Morriseau, is scheduled for Wednesday.

The exhibition of 59 works covering the period 1958-2002 will not be open to the public until Friday.

Expect some surprises. A radically different, more aboriginal approach has been taken in preparing the Morrisseau show.

The exhibition could very well be the final nail in the coffin of institutionalized discrimination against First Nations art, or what used to be called Indian art, at the National Gallery. (The story of Inuit art is different. It has long been shown in the National Gallery, but in separate basement quarters -- a subterranean art reserve far from the Group of Seven or European masters.)

Throughout Canada's history, most aboriginal art was generally considered not as fine art, but something akin to folk art, decorative art or handicraft and deemed worthy of being shown only in museums with mummies and dinosaurs rather than with Rembrandts and Picassos. The National Gallery did acquire some aboriginal art in its infancy but by the early 1900s the collection was turned over to what is now called the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Attitudes at the National Gallery began changing in the 1980s when it started acquiring contemporary, but not historical, aboriginal works. First up were works by Carl Beam. Robert Houle, Alex Janvier and others came later. (Artists of aboriginal origins, including Rita Letendre and Robert Markle, were in the collection before Beam but the style and content of their acquired works were not considered particularily aboriginal.)

Despite being widely recognized as the father of contemporary aboriginal art and despite the pleas of some influential people, Morrisseau did not become part of the collection until 2000. As early as 1972, Selwyn Dewdney, an influential anthropologist and art enthusiast who befriended Morrisseau in northern Ontario early in his career, pressed the National Gallery to buy some of the artist's work. The gallery refused.

"I made a pitch at the National Gallery for inclusion of your work in the permanent collection but encountered deaf ears," Dewdney wrote Morrisseau. "It appears that if you're of Amerindian origin the proper place for your art is a museum!"

The National Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario and others decided only a few years ago it was time to re-integrate historical aboriginal art in their collections. "It makes a lot of sense," Pierre Theberge, gallery director, said in a 2002 interview. "It will give a broader perspective to Canadian art, not just the art of the white settlers but the art of the aboriginals." Theberge said this change in attitude was driven by a larger movement within society to welcome aboriginals into the manstream.

But the apartheid would not officially end until a First Nations artist was finally given a solo show akin to the kinds of exhibitions granted such "white" Canadian artists as Tom Thomson, Christopher Pratt or Emily Carr. The consensus among the aboriginal art community was that Morrisseau had to be the one.

"The aboriginal art community sees him as an icon, both for his esthetic qualities and pioneering qualities," says Lee-Ann Martin, curator of contemporary aboriginal art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Morrisseau was the first Canadian aboriginal artist, creating aboriginal-themed works, to receive adulation within the mainstream art world. His first exhibition, in 1962 at Toronto's Pollock Gallery, sold out. He was about 30 at the time, his exact age being somewhat of a mystery because of conflicting birth records.

Art critics quickly labelled Morrisseau a "genius" but, over the years, they also loaded other, less flattering baggage onto the artist. This exhibition offers a new, more aboriginal perspective on an artist perhaps best known in the Canadian news media during the 1980s for trading art on the streets of Vancouver for bottles of booze.

Morrisseau is now into his early 70s. He suffers Parkinson's disease, has difficulty speaking and no longer paints. But his influence within the Canadian art world remains.

The artist often said he wanted to be "the most powerful shaman in the universe." Some admirers think he reached his goal. But even if he didn't, he certainly had a turbulent, controversial and, at times, magical journey leaping for the stars.

The Ottawa Citizen

January 29, 2006

 

The Virgin Mary - Authentic Norval Morrisseau Art

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"The Virgin Mary"

 55"x32", 1966

Norval Morrisseau

Collection of the Canada Council for the Arts; This painting was exhibited at "NORVAL MORRISSEAU - SHAMAN ARTIST" - The first solo exhibition featuring a First Nations artist in 126-year history of the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition was held in Ottawa, Ontario from February 3rd to April 30th, 2006.

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Authenticity Known - Ross Montour on the Norval Morrisseau Retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada

"Shaman Warrior", © 1990s Norval Morrisseau

Authenticity known

Two weeks ago I attended a major retrospective of Ojibwa artist Norval Morrisseau at Canada's National Gallery of Art. There is nothing 'western' about Morrisseau's art. It grows powerfully and organically out of his own people's Native tradition. It makes no apologies on behalf of its creator - indeed it confronts western sensibilities and announces its own potency. Morrisseau could care less if the 'white man' never declared him credible; he knows his authenticity. Like the great Nanibooshou of his people's legends, Morrisseau shakes his great head, lays down his foot and the leaves fall from the trees. Compare this to European art at the turn of the last century. Photography, a creature of western technology, had only recently reared its head prompting artists to run for the cover of ingenuity. "Something new, something new," became the 'Om' of art. That most deconstructionist of artists Pablo Picasso sheds an interesting light on all of this. When he and others in his circle began co-opting forms from oceanic and African cultures it was an admission of the desperate extremes western artists would go to in order 'break new ground.'
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And while their adoring publics were tittering about the greatness of these new maestros' wild and carnivorous works, the newly reforming masters of orthodoxy continued to mischaracterize the sources of Picasso et al's 'inspiration.' They continued to look down their noses at the 'primitives' (savages) who truly created the source art and their cultures. In Canada, Native artists who painted in styles and forms that grew authentically out of their own cultures had to live with the fact that in their own land their works were 'banished' from the cultural temples of white society - i.e. the major public art galleries. For over 40 years the 'esteemed' Art Gallery of Ontario revealed its ethnocentricity by declaring the works of Morrisseau and others as being fit only to be shown in ethnographic and natural history museums. How barren!
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Back to the Morrisseau exhibition in Ottawa. After viewing the showing, my wife and I decided to take in the works of the permanent collection. Walking through hall after hall of Flemish masters and Italian renaissance masters etc., we stumbled across a room labeled 'New York School.' Entering the room we were immediately confronted by two massive colour field paintings by Barnett Newman. One of these - 'Red Stripe' - was a triptych nearly 20 feet in height. It almost demanded an act of worship be done. I laughed out loud because, for one thing, it reminded me of my first viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember the scene at the end when the cavemen come upon the huge blank monolith, the drums pounding out the rhythm in the soundtrack... Enigmatic to say the least! In the end they worshipped nothing. My sincerest thanks for your patience in reading this rant. I make no apology though - I am, after all, a Mohawk.

Ross Montour
Kahnawake, QC, Canada

Source: Robert Genn's "The Painter's Keys"

* The painting in this post: "Shaman Warrior", 48"x23", © 1990s Gabe Vadas